Abstract
Recent developments in spatial analysis and spatial data have allowed researchers to investigate various geographical factors in the quantitative analysis of conflict and war (Ward in Polit Geogr 21(2):155–158, 2002). Despite the importance of territory in interstate conflict, there has been a limited interest in the application of spatial analysis to the study of territorial conflict. Using geographically weighted regression (GWR) we evaluated the existing explanations of territorial conflict provided by a global scale analysis that assumes a spatial consistency in the explanatory variables. Specifically, we revisited Paul Huth’s foundational work by using GWR to examine the spatial pattern in the sign and significance of the variables. The result of GWR shows that the escalation of territorial conflict cannot be fully explained by one universal model. There is a high level of spatial variation in the regression parameters and the explanatory power of the model varies over space. A k-means cluster analysis was implemented for a further investigation of the regional pattern of the underlying causes of territorial disputes. The result of our GWR suggests the necessity and possibility to pursue a local or regional scale approach to the study of territorial conflict, an approach that challenges an epistemology of seeking a single explanation for the causes of conflict that neglects regional context. The spatial heterogeneity in the causes of territorial conflict escalation we find is framed within a narrative of the intertwined processes of colonialism, Cold War legacies, and competition for resources.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
The Militarized Interstate Dispute (MID) data records militarized incidents, such as threats, display or use force against one or more other states between 1816 and 2001. The information includes actor(s) and target, incident data and type, issue type, location description, fatalities of actor(s), and the source of information (Ghosn et al. 2004).
References
Agnew, J. (2003). Geopolitics: Re-visioning world politics. London: Routledge.
Anselin, L. (1988). Spatial econometrics: Method and models. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Braithwaite, A. (2005). Location, location, location…identifying hot spots of international conflict. International Interactions, 31(3), 251–273.
Brecher, M., & Wilkenfeld, J. (1997). A study of crisis. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press.
Bueno de mesquita, B., & Lalman, D. (1990). Domestic opposition and foreign war. American Political Science Review, 84(3), 746–766.
Buhaug, H., & Gleditsch, K. (2008). Contagion or confusion? Why conflicts cluster in space. International Studies Quarterly, 52(2), 215–233.
Buhaug, H., & Lujala, P. (2005). Accounting for scale: Measuring geography in quantitative studies of civil war. Political Geography, 24(4), 399–418.
Buhaug, H., & Rød, J. (2006). Local determinants of African civil wars, 1970–2001. Political Geography, 25(3), 315–335.
Buzan, B., & Waever, O. (2003). Regions and power: The structure of international security. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Charlton, M., & Fotheringham, A. (2009). Geographically weighted regression: White paper. Maynooth: National Centre for Geocomputation, National University of Ireland.
Charlton, M., Fotheringham, S., & Brunson, C. (2003). GWR 3: Software for geographically weighted regression, Version 3.0.1. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Spatial Analysis Research Group, University of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne.
Diehl, P. (1991). The new geopolitics. In M. Ward (Ed.), The new geopolitics (pp. 11–38). Philadelphia, PA: Gordon and Breach.
Dodds, K. (2003). Cold war geopolitics. In J. Agnew, K. Mitchell, & G. Toal (Eds.), A companion to political geography (pp. 204–218). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
Dzurek, D. (2005). What makes territory important: Tangible and intangible dimensions. GeoJournal, 64(4), 263–274.
Elden, S. (2009). Terror and territory: The spatial extent of territory. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Fotheringham, A., Brunsdon, A., & Charlton, M. (2002). Geographically weighted regression: The analysis of spatially varying relationships. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Ghosn, F., Palmer, G., & Bremer, S. (2004). The MID3 data set, 1993–2001: Procedures, coding rules, and description. Conflict Management and Peace Science, 21(2), 133–154.
Gibler, D. (1996). Alliances that never balance: The territorial settlement treaty. Conflict Management and Peace Science, 15(1), 75–97.
Gilmore, E., Gleditsch, N., Lujala, P., & Rød, J. (2005). Conflict diamonds: A new dataset. Conflict Management and Peace Science, 22(3), 257–272.
Gleditsch, K. S. (2002). All international politics is local: The diffusion of conflict, integration, and democratization. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Goodchild, M., & Janelle, D. (2010). Toward critical spatial thinking in the social sciences and humanities. GeoJournal, 75(1), 3–13.
Gurr, T., Jaggers, K., & Moore, W. (1990). The transformation of the Western State: The growth of democracy, autocracy, and state power since 1800. Studies in Comparative International Development, 25(1), 73–108.
Halliday, F. (1983). The making of the second cold war. London: Verso.
Hemmer, C., & Katzenstein, P. (2002). Why is there no NATO in Asia? Collective identity, regionalism, and the origins of multilateralism. International Organization, 56(3), 575–607.
Hensel, P. (2000). Territory: Theory and evidence on geography and conflict. In J. Vasquez (Ed.), What do we know about war? (pp. 57–84). Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.
Hensel, P., & Mitchell, S. (2005). Issue indivisibility and territorial claims. GeoJournal, 64(4), 275–285.
Herbst, J. (2000). States and power in Africa: Comparative lessons in authority and control. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Huth, P. (1996). Standing your ground: Territorial disputes and international conflict. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press.
Huth, P., & Allee, T. (2002). The democratic peace and territorial conflict in the twentieth century. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Huth, P., & Russett, B. (1998). Deterrence failure and crisis escalation. International Studies Quarterly, 32(1), 29–45.
Kaufman, L., & Rousseeuw, P. (2005). Finding groups in data: An introduction to cluster analysis. New York: Wiley-Interscience.
Le Billon, P. (2001). The political ecology of war: Natural resources and armed conflicts. Political Geography, 20(5), 561–584.
Lujala, P., Gleditsch, N., & Gilmore, E. (2005). A diamond curse? civil war and a lootable resource. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 49(4), 538–562.
Lujala, P., Rød, J., & Thieme, N. (2007). Fighting over oil: Introducing a new dataset. Conflict Management and Peace Science, 24(3), 239–256.
Mansfield, P. (1992). The Arabs (3rd ed.). London, NY: Penguin.
Maoz, Z., & Russett, B. (1993). Normative and structural causes of democratic peace, 1946–1986. American Political Science Review, 87(3), 624–638.
Mosse, G. L. (1993). Confronting the nation: Jewish and Western nationalism. Hanover: Brandies University Press.
Murphy, A. (2002). National claims to territory in the modern state system: Geographical considerations. Geopolitics, 7(2), 193–214.
Newman, D., & Paasi, A. (1998). Fences and neighbours in the postmodern world: boundary narratives in political geography. Progress in Human geography, 22(2), 186–207.
O’Lear, S., Diehl, P., Frazier, D., & Allee, T. (2005). Dimension of territorial conflict and resolution: Tangible and intangible values of territory. GeoJournal, 64(4), 259–261.
O’Loughlin, J., & Wittmer, F. (2011). The localized geographies of violence in the North Caucasus of Russia, 1999–2007. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 101(1), 178–201.
O’Loughlin, J. (2000). Geography as space and geography as place: The divide between political science and political geography continues. Geopolitics, 5(3), 126–137.
Ó Tuathail, G. (1998). Political geography III: Dealing with deterritorialization. Progress in Human Geography, 22(1), 81–93.
Páez, A., & Scott, D. (2004). Spatial statistics for urban analysis: A review of techniques with examples. GeoJournal, 61(1), 53–67.
Páez, A., Uchida, T., & Miyamoto, K. (2002). A general framework for estimation and inference of geographically weighted regression models: 1. Location-specific kernel bandwidths and a test for local heterogeneity. Environment and Planning A, 34(4), 733–754.
Peluso, N., & Vandergeest, P. (2011). Political ecologies of war and forests: Counterinsurgencies and the making of national natures. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 101(3), 587–608.
Raleigh, C., Cunningham, D., Wilhelmsen, L., & Gleditsch, N. (2006). Conflict Sites 1946–2005. Centre for the Study of Civil War, PRIO.http://www.prio.no/sptrans/1140767671/conflict%20site%20codebook%20v2.pdf. Accessed 12 September 2011.
Raleigh, C., Linke, A., Hegre, H., & Karlsen, J. (2010). Introducing ACLED: An armed conflict location and event dataset. Journal of Peace Research, 47(5), 651–660.
Senese, P. (2005). Territory, contiguity, and international conflict: Assessing a new joint explanation. American Journal of Political Science, 49(4), 769–779.
Senese, P., & Vasquez, J. (2003). A unified explanation of territorial conflict: Testing the impact of sampling bias, 1919–1992. International Studies Quarterly, 47(2), 275–298.
Senese, P., & Vasquez, J. (2008). The steps to war. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Sidaway, J. (2008). The geography of political geography. In K. Cox, M. Low, & J. Robinson (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of political geography (pp. 21–40). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Snyder, T. (2003). The reconstruction of nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Stubbs, R. (2002). ASEAN PLUS THREE emerging East Asian regionalism? Asian Survey, 42(3), 440–455.
Vasquez, J. (1993). The war puzzle. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
Vasquez, J. (1995). Why do neighbors fight—Proximity, contiguity, or territoriality? Journal of Peace Research, 32(3), 277–293.
Vasquez, J., & Henehan, M. (2001). Territorial disputes and the probability of war, 1816–1992. Journal of Peace Research, 38(2), 123–138.
Vasquez, J., & Valeriano, B. (2008). Territory as a source of conflict and a road to peace. In J. Bercovitch, V. Kremenyuk, & W. Zatman (Eds.), The Sage handbook of conflict resolution (pp. 191–209). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Väyrynen, R. (1984). Regional conflict formations: An intractable problem of international relations. Journal of Peace Research, 21(4), 337–359.
Walter, B. (2003). Explaining the intractability of territorial conflict. International Studies Review, 5(3), 137–153.
Walter, B. (2006). Building reputation: Why governments fight some separatists but not others. American Journal of Political Science, 50(2), 313–330.
Waltz, K. (1979). Theory of international politics. Reading, MA: Addision-Wesley.
Waltz, K. (2000). Structural realism after the Cold War. International Security, 25(1), 5–41.
Ward, M. (2002). The development and application of spatial analysis for political methodology. Political Geography, 21(2), 155–158.
Wheeler, D., & Tiefelsdorf, M. (2005). Multicollinearity and correlation among local regression coefficients in geographically weighted regression. Journal of Geographical Systems, 7(2), 161–187.
Windle, M., Rose, G., Devillers, R., & Fortin, M-J. (2010). Exploring spatial non-stationarity of fisheries survey data using geographically weighted regression (GWR): An example from the Northwest Atlantic. ICES Journal of Marine Science, 67(1), 145–154.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Chi, SH., Flint, C. Standing different ground: the spatial heterogeneity of territorial disputes. GeoJournal 78, 553–573 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-012-9451-0
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-012-9451-0